For Thanksgiving of 2004 I drove on out to visit a couple of good friends of mine who live in Palm Springs. Originally I had been thinking of doing a long backpacking trip in Joshua Tree, but amazingly a freak snowstorm had rampaged through the area and snowed the park in! Snow and ice do not agree with rear wheel drive sportscars, so my friend and I took the tramway up to Mount San Jacinto State Park. Overlooking the valley with the mountains of Joshua Tree poking their heads through on the other side, the tramway ascends thousands of feet from the valley floor all the way up to the top of the mountain. Although it was in the high sixties in the valley, at the top of the mountain it was in the 40s and there were a couple of feet of snow were still on the ground. The snow was deep enough that it made hiking a lot harder then without it, forcing me to lift my knees quite high to get over the snow and tread carefully lest I fall onto the wrong side of a rock or log. I had a great time with my friend. Being in the beauty of nature with great company is one of the things for which I am truly thankful.

The Photographs

This was really my first time doing snow photography and was definitely a learning experience. I wound up underexposing shots a bit too much and was a bit struck by the wide range of contrast of a lot of the things I wanted to shoot. Snow is really bright!

The pictures were shot with my Minolta system on a roll of Kodachrome PKR 64. Click "Next" in the upper right to begin. Some digital camera shots were taken by my friend as well.